I love doing that stuff and I think that to be an interesting journalist right now you have to be a little curious about code of all kinds. That’s why I’ve been really excited about Code Year, which is a year’s worth of free code tutorials from Codecademy. They’ve started it off with JavaScript, which I’d taken a crack at learning a little while ago. The Codecademy approach is really fun and I highly recommend it.

It is free, after all, and it’ll tickle the Foursquare part of your brain, if you need additional motivation.

Got other favorite methods of learning such things? I’m also a fan of w3schools.com — though that’s got substantially less hand-holding and is better for folks who are great at motivating themselves. That was my original resource for JavaScript (along with Eloquent JavaScript, which sort of reads like JavaScript for English majors and is available on your Kindle) and continues to be a nice resource for CSS and plenty of other things.